THE COMMENT – This is dirty commercial hypocrisy. But is it just that? Why are the Nazi burnings of books on socialist and communist thought ugly and bad, while Puffin Books’ burning of Dahl is a breath of fresh air? The exegetes of this new fundamentalism of sensitive annulment have nothing to do with democracy, they look more like the fierce Iranian ayatollahs
The train from cancel cultures He’s gone and he’s going to overwhelm us, sorry he’s going to cancel everyone. The English writer ended up there again and for good in the viewfinder Roald Dahl. His publisher will reprint it shortly The Chocolate Factory or James and the Giant Peach Deleting (and converting) in the original texts of words, terms, concepts as offensive as “fat”, “small”, “dwarf”. In practice, stories, novels, short stories, ideas are rewritten and shaped at will and sensibility. Something in between unconscious revenge for injustice suffereda dirty commercial hypocrisy and the fundamentalism Fascist of the individual thought states. Sooner or later, this subject, which encompasses not only literature in the narrower sense, but also the meaning and ending of history in the broadest sense, will have to be faced with sincere openness.
Because the Nazi book burnings about socialist and communist thinking are ugly and bad, while those of Puffin Books on Dahl are a breath of fresh air? Because when we used to read the Bradbury of Fahrenheit 451 or we used to see the movie from cheater did we find in the same novel the radical gesture of covering the tracks of those who did not follow the dominant thought of this determined and fictionalized dictatorial culture criminal? These days, the thrill of the simple stakes, the damn memories, seems to belong to the so-called “good guys,” and the question gets more complicated. Yes, because the exegetes of this new fundamentalism of sensitive annulment are more like that fierce Iranian ayatollahs as the democratic judges of the People’s Court. It’s no coincidence that Dahl was one of the first to show his outrage at the issue like a writer Salman Rushdie who lost an eye and a hand as a result of a repealing fatwa. “Dahl wasn’t an angel,” Rushdie tweeted, “but that’s bullshit.” In short, a thought, a word, an idea needs to be stigmatized, maybe fought, if need be defeated, but not cancelled. Anyone who cancels is always in the wrong. Trivially, whoever deletes is a fascist. Even if it blurs the traces of fascist writers and traces of fascism tout-court.
This is for the gesture itself. Then other problems of method and meaning open up. And here another chasm arises. Trivial: But with all the problems associated with being able to distinguish between true and false in historical facts or everyday news, how on earth do we allow ourselves to obliterate traces of a more or less recent past? Since when The sport of the “good” and “right” Is it erasing, transforming, rewriting history to your liking? No democratic enlightenment, otherworldly justice, no scientific principle justifies such a massacre. No, this side of Houellebecq Offenses women and Islamic culture, go ahead, delete it and replace it with the more politically correct verses, I don’t know, of a Desiati or a Scurati. The presence of Kevin Spacey in the usual suspects and in Seven can short-circuit those who have been harassed in their lives, so let’s erase it or replace it with, say, the reappearance of Cary Grant. At this point we also enter house after house and burn the old copies of books, films, insensitive historical facts that, if you want, could reappear from the ashes and cause the most sensitive to panic. Well we ask modern democratic censorship 3.0, the horny new translators of the sentence (by Dahl) “enormously fat” with “enormously”: Is this heteronormated jam, devoid of differences, nuances, viewpoints, judgments, free thinking, the future that awaits us? Well, if the answer is yes, we will resist. And it’s going to be a tough fight. After all, anyone who erases or transforms traces of history and culture no longer offends the sensibility of each individual, but has started to do so make a fool of someone the intelligence of the community.